Saturday, July 13, 2013

Two similar experiences today got me thinking, and of course
that often leads to a blog post.The
experiences were about stereotypes.The scientific
version of stereotypes is that the brain is wired to consolidate how we store
memories to save time and storage space.We save something like a statistical average of similar experiences.Anything that is true of many members of a
group becomes our mental model of the whole group.Unless a particular individual is important
to us, we forget most of the details about them and just use the average – the stereotype.It makes sense adaptively when you think
about survival over the past millennia of evolution.But today, it leads to jumping to unconscious
assumptions about groups (like race, occupation, or height) that may not fit many
individual members of that group.

The first experience was listening to this TED talk this
morning.In it, a doctor describes two
very different reactions he had to two patients in the ER.The first was a cancer patient who was dying.He felt overwhelmed with compassion.The cancer was not her fault and it was
terrible that life had dealt her this unfair early death.He went out of his way to make her as
comfortable as possible.The second
patient was an obese woman with Type II diabetes and for whom he had to
amputate a foot.He felt contempt for
this patient.If she had just cared a
little more, exercised a little more, ate a little less, she could have avoided
this fate.Then, a few years later, he
came to understand that we have more control over our susceptibility to cancer
than we thought, and we actually have a lot less control over many kinds of
obesity.In tears, he described how much
he wishes he could go back in time and apologize to the diabetic patient, not
because he gave her insufficient medical care, but because he failed as a
human.His stereotypes about cancer and
obesity led him to jump to conclusions that were not correct.

The second experience was standing in line at the
supermarket.In front of me was an obese
woman who was purchasing 100 cans of cat food, four large bags of chips, and a
gallon of ice cream.I couldn’t help but
notice how quickly my brain jumped to the stereotype of the “cat lady” even
though I knew nothing about her.I could
image her living in a dark apartment with a dozen cats, no human friends, and
the neighborhood kids ringing her doorbell and running.As a Human Factors geek, my thoughts were
about the speed and ease with which my brain jumped to the stereotype rather
than any kind of contempt like the doctor had.But still, very similar.

So where does this leave me on a cool (for July) Saturday
afternoon when I have much better things to do than sit in front of my computer
(I bet that activated a stereotype in your head !!!)?I think this is a case for metacognition to
the rescue.Metacognition is the ability
to monitor your own thinking with the intention to improve your situation
awareness, decision making, and problem solving.If we can recognize when a stereotype is
leading us to a conclusion that may not be appropriate for this situation,
perhaps we can take a step back and look for real evidence.But only if we know it is happening, which means
we need to accept the fact that